What’s making news today
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of national news for Thursday, October 8. Here’s what is making headlines today.
- Specialist police officers bearing assault rifles will begin training exercises on Sydney’s streets in the coming weeks, as a rapid response unit formed following the Bondi massacre starts a new phase of training.
- Australia’s banks are seeking an exemption from competition laws to set up regional banking hubs, where several institutions would share one physical facility.
- Lawyers have shared Christa Pike’s first words after she woke from botched execution which was believed to have left her “brain-dead” until she unexpectedly woke up.
- Approval for a major coal mine expansion has been declared invalid by the High Court in a decision that will force NSW planning authorities to reckon with emissions from Australian coal burnt overseas.
- Previously unearthed tweets have revealed the flydubai co-pilot accused of trying to hijack an aircraft bound for Israel told followers his time in Australia was among the “golden years” of his religious devotion.
- And reality TV star Sam Wood is due to appear in court today, where he will apply for bail after being charged with domestic violence offences.
Pocock, opposition call for change as ATO prepares credit card ban
The opposition and a prominent crossbencher are calling on the government to act as the ATO doubles down on blocking credit card payments.
Australians will no longer be able to pay tax with credit cards from December, after the ATO declared on October 1 it could not absorb the credit card surcharges it was now banned from passing on to taxpayers.
The tax office held its ground in a meeting with business groups on Wednesday, which bred complaints it was shirking a new cost burden the government was forcing on vendors.
ACT Senator David Pocock told Newscorp’s News24 channel that the situation needed to change, saying it amounted to small businesses being slugged twice as customers spent less money.
Sri Lanka’s former first lady arrested on corruption allegations
The wife of Sri Lanka’s powerful former president Mahinda Rajapaksa was detained Wednesday on allegations of misusing donations received for her charity when she was first lady.
Police questioned Shiranthi Rajapaksa at her home and later took her before a court, which ordered her detained for a week pending investigations. Police then escorted Rajapaksa, who had one eye bandaged from recent surgery, to a vehicle to be taken to a jail.
Rajapaksa was accused of misusing funds that her charity received as a donation from a state bank earmarked for the purchase of a scanner for a government hospital. The then-head of the bank also was arrested for allegedly circumventing procedures in releasing the money to the charity. The court released him on bail.
The former first couple’s son, lawmaker Namal Rajapaksa, also has been detained on charges of bribery.
US carries out first execution since Pike survived lethal injection
A Texas man who fatally shot a convenience store clerk was put to death on Wednesday evening (US time), becoming the 30th person executed in the US this year and the first since Tennessee’s failed attempt to administer a lethal injection to Christa Pike a week ago.
Jamaal Howard, 46, was pronounced dead at 8.03pm after receiving a fatal dose of pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville.
He was convicted of killing a woman in a 2000 store robbery caught on surveillance video.
Howard was given the same drugs used on Christa Pike in Tennessee a week earlier.
Before he died, Howard’s attorneys unsuccessfully sought to block the execution by arguing that he was intellectual disabled and that he faced risks similar to those in Pike’s case because both states use pentobarbital for lethal injections.
AP
Oil tanker attacked in gulf for first time in weeks as Iran war heats up
A tanker was struck by projectiles off the coast of Qatar on Wednesday (Qatar time), according to a report from UK Maritime Trade Operations, a rare attack deep inside the Persian Gulf.
The vessel was hit north of Madinat ash Shamal, at the emirate’s tip. Casualties were reported and authorities are now investigating, UKMTO said, without identifying the ship or saying who was responsible.
It’s the first reported strike on a tanker deep within the gulf in about a month. On September 9, UKMTO said a vessel was hit by an unknown projectile about 28 nautical miles southeast of Al-Faw, Iraq. Most of the attacks since then have been concentrated in or around the Strait of Hormuz.
The strike comes as the conflict between Washington and Tehran heats up once again. The White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up attack options against Iran that could be executed before the midterm elections in the US, the Atlantic reported, citing two administration officials.
Victoria’s data centre fast-track ‘may have stalled’ before election
Victoria’s fast-track approval process for data centres may have stalled ahead of the state election, the industry’s peak body has told a parliamentary inquiry.
Data Centres Australia chief executive Belinda Dennett said the four-month process, in which trained staff steered projects through government agencies, was “best in class”.
But she told the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence on Thursday in Melbourne it had “perhaps paused with the election”, while the global market “is moving at pace”.
Her group represents about 86 per cent of operational capacity.
Trump claims Federal Reserve ‘would like to see the country do badly’
US President Donald Trump, asked by a reporter about mortgage rates, said the Federal Reserve Board “would like to see the country do badly”.
The country’s 30-year mortgage rate last week hit its highest point in almost three years.
Trump called Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh “great” but added the rest of the board “would like to see the country do badly, in my opinion, because I think interest rates should come down”.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in the Oval Office with Trump, said inflation was high because of the energy shock.
“So once we get on the other side of this Iran conflict, (the) energy market is going to be well supplied, and we will move down towards the Fed’s target and mortgage rates and the 10-year will come back down,” Bessent added.
Reuters
Cornell gang-rape accuser was ‘misled’ about criminal investigation, her lawyer says
The woman accusing several men of raping her at a Cornell University fraternity party was “misled” about the status of the criminal investigation in the weeks after she went to police, her lawyer said.
Even as she took her allegations about a 2024 gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house through Cornell’s internal disciplinary process, the university’s police department gave her the impression that a criminal investigation was continuing, lawyer Thomas Giuffra told The Associated Press.
In fact, the criminal inquiry ended almost as soon as it began.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, the local prosecutor, made the decision not to go forward with a criminal case within days of the woman giving her first substantial interviews to police.
Made by AI? Google now lets anyone check
Google has opened its AI detection tool to the public, letting Australians check whether an image, video or audio clip was made with its AI or a partner’s.
The SynthID Detector went live globally this week, two days after Google fronted parliament’s AI inquiry in Sydney, where MPs questioned tech giants over safety and copyright.
The tool scans files for an invisible watermark Google adds to AI-generated content.
Google says it has watermarked more than 180 billion images and videos since 2023.
Evicted 87-year-old woman at heart of Spain’s housing protests dies
Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction sparked housing protests in Spain, has died, Madrid’s tenants’ union said.
Abascal’s eviction sparked a series of protests across Spain in the past couple of weeks, including activists camping on one of Madrid’s main squares, and calls for tackling a mounting housing crisis.
Those protests, along with parliament’s rejection last week of decrees aimed at curbing evictions and limiting rent pressures, prompted Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to call an early election for November 29.
Sánchez is seeking to shift the political narrative from his government’s handling of a migrant crisis in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta and a series of corruption cases involving his Socialist Party and his family to the housing crisis, an area in which he can harness growing resentment about rising rents.
Taylor ‘confident’ in Coalition migration plan
Coalition leader Angus Taylor has defended the opposition’s plan to slash net migration to about 100,000 in the first year should it win the election.
Critics have raised concerns about potential workforce shortages, and questioned whether the policy had been officially costed.
“We’ve laid out a plan, we’ve laid out the numbers … we’re confident that it’s budget neutral,” Taylor said in a press conference earlier today.
“If our labor market is dependent on guest workers, we’ve got to fix it,” he said.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
